Living next door to malice

DULCIE Morgan has more than 200 murderers, thieves and petty criminals living across the road ? but she doesn't mind.

The Queen Street resident has lived across the road from Grafton Correctional Centre with her husband Greg for 38 years.

"Sometimes the inmates go on with a bit of rot, but it doesn't worry us, not at all," Mrs Morgan said.

"I can hear them rattling their cages and swearing.

"They won't hurt us, it is the ones outside who are doing the damage."

The centre houses up to 139 men in the medium security prison, up to 130 men and 20 women in the minimum security prison and a periodic detention centre.

Built in 1893, the jail contained some of the state's most notorious criminals between 1943 to 1976. Mrs Morgan said she remembered when the first man, Raymond John Denning, escaped from the maximum security prison in 1980.

"In those days you left the house unlocked so the police came in and looked under the kids' beds and searched the back shed," she said.

Mrs Morgan said she once found a bag of prison clothes which two escapees had left after they changed into civilian clothes underneath her neighbour's caravan.

"We weren't worried because they wouldn't stay around here," she said. "They would be trying to get straight out of town."

Mrs Morgan said she looked at the jail as if it was just a big house.

A New South Wales Department of Corrective Services spokesperson said it was possible murderers were in Grafton jail.

"The population fluctuates and people get shifted around the state," the spokesperson said. "When you are in the system and go in as maximum security, towards the end of their release they would go into me- dium."